Page 63 of The Duke
She glanced up at him the moment his shadow crossed her canvas. Her eyes crinkled in that way that made him sure she was pleased, though he couldn’t imagine why she would be.
“Cole.”
His heart tripped at the sound of his name on her lips, and he managed a curt nod.
“What an agreeable surprise.” Scooping extra skirts beneath her, she made space for him on the bench.
“Is it?” It discomfited him just how much he wanted the radiance in her eyes to be genuine. Because when she looked at him, the shadows he’d just noted were replaced by a warm light. He found it extraordinary. Confounding, but extraordinary nonetheless.
“How striking you look,” she remarked, and didn’t give him a moment to process the abrupt spurt of pleasure at the words before she turned to Cheever. “Would you very much mind procuring the three of us some lemonade from the stand at the entry? His Grace seems uncomfortably hot.”
Cheever folded the paper just so, setting it on his seat before bowing to them both. “Of course, my lady. Your Grace.” His stride was that of a much younger man as he left them.
“Do sit,” she invited. “The shade here is excellent.”
“I really should be going,” he excused, and then somehow they were nearly at eye level as the sun-warmed stone of the bench caught him when he sat. What was it about her that drew him like this? It was as though he was a ship tossed about in a storm, and she a siren luring him to his fate. In her presence, his body was consistently at odds with his mind, and refused to obey him in any regard.
“Though we are little better than strangers, you always seem to treat me as though you know me,” he remarked.
“And yet it seems I know nothing about you,” she challenged.
It could have been the dappled sunlight, the distraction she provided from his consistent disappointment, the mysterious glint in her eye, or some odd combination of all of these variables that summoned a rakish mischief within him he’d thought forever lost.
“I am an open book,” he declared with false solemnity.
“You areanythingbut that,” she laughed.
He made a sound of mock outrage. “Ask me any question you please, and suffer the consequences of my absolute candor.”
She pretended to give it some thought. “Speaking of books, then. Who is your most beloved author?”
“Shakespeare, obviously.”
She cast him a dubious look. “Which play?”
It was his turn to give it some thought and answered with a defiant smirk, “The one wherein the parent dies and someone goes mad.”
“That’s nearly all of them.” Her eyes danced with mirth. “So much for candor. I’m beginning to doubt you know Shakespeare at all.”
Cole plucked from his memory one of the numerous sonnets he’d devoured as a child.
“‘Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove, O no! it is an ever-fixed mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken…’” He let the words trail away as their significance pierced him with solemnity.
“‘Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,’” she finished breathlessly, the paintbrush trembling in her hand. “‘But bears it out even to the edge of doom.’”
Their eyes locked and held as Cole’s mind churned with the same frenzy his stallion’s hooves had only minutes prior. Was that what he was doing? Bearing out his obsessive need for Ginny, even to the edge of his own doom? What would the bard have to say about his behavior? he wondered. Would he have censured Cole for pining after Ginny all this time? Or for forgetting to do so when thusly engaged with the Lady Anstruther?
“I stand both corrected and astonished,” she admitted, seemingly impervious to his thoughts. “I, too, love Shakespeare. Though I enjoy his words more when performed than the reading of them. To be honest, Isobel is the great reader in our family, as I tend to appreciate more visual modalities.” She gestured to her painting.
“I can’t find fault in that,” he murmured, unable to tear his eyes from the vision she made. A violet blooming in the shade of their tree. “There is much to appreciate.”
A pretty pink blush stained her high cheekbones, and she lowered bashful lashes. “You’ve been riding today.” She swept some horsehair from his jacket, and Cole could almost hear the scandalized gasps of the noble matrons passing in their expensive carriages. He loved that she seemed to care even less than he did. “It is my most fervent regret that I never had the chance to learn the equestrian arts.”
His first instinct was to offer to teach her, and then he realized what the sight of her on horseback would do to him. She was a lithe woman, and proximity to her rolling hips and her bottom bouncing in a saddle might just be the death of him.
Shifting away from her, he gestured to the nude Achilles statue, the hero’s only adornment, other than a sword and shield, an intimately placed fig leaf. “You abandoned your garden today in search of more… stimulating inspiration for your art?”
An impish dimple appeared in her cheek. “I’ve always been fond of this statue,” she admitted. “On a day like this, I like the play of the sunlight on the darker bronze of his musculature.”
